Thursday, October 29, 2015

This is the first of a series titled "Common Sense about Lucid Dreaming"

A lucid dream is one in which you are aware that you are
dreaming. This awareness can give you the power to use the dreamscape as an
adventure theme park, a place of training or higher education, or a field in
which you can vanquish nightmare terrors and recognize and integrate different
aspects of yourself.
How do you become a lucid dreamer?
Let me count the ways.

1. Waking
up spontaneously to the fact that you are dreaming

This may happen because you notice an anomaly inside the
dream. In ordinary reality, you don’t stand up naked in front of a crowd, you
are not still in elementary school and you do not keep dragons in your
basement. You look in a mirror and see a different face.
When dream elements of this kind
make you aware that you are dreaming, the trick is to stay with the dream instead
of letting yourself be startled out of it. This requires practice and a fine
melding of excitement and familiarity. Your excitement over what is going on
will make you want to stay with the dream. Increasing familiarity with the phenomenon
will help you maintain the poise and balance to go on with it.
It is interesting that it is often scary experiences in early life, especially adolescence, that first bring
spontaneous dream lucidity. For example, the phenomenon of sleep paralysis, in
which you begin to stir from sleep and find that you cannot operate major
muscle groups, can be the prelude to lucid dreaming – when you are able to
relax into the situation and let something else develop.

2. Recognize
your dream signs

You want to follow the practice of journaling all your dream experiences. This is
going to be your personal encyclopedia of symbols and will give your first-hand
data on the reality of precognition, parallel universes and so much more. In
relation to developing your abilities as a lucid dreamer, your journal is the
place where you can study your dream signs – the elements in your dreams that
could make you aware that you are dreaming.
For example, the dead are alive in
your dreams. Or a dream element is repeated, exactly, in the way the black cat
runs across the room the same way twice in the movie The Matrix. There is a sudden transit from one scene to another and
you don’t know how you got to the new place. You are making love with a movie
star. You find that when you try to read a text, it blurs.
You can then select one or more
dream signs and tell yourself that when you observe the same element, you will
become aware that you are dreaming. You can borrow suggestions from frequent
flyers. A very popular one is Carlos Castaneda’s suggestion (in Journey to Ixtlan) that whenever you see
your hands, you should ask, “Am I dreaming”? I do that when I look at my watch.
Inside a dream, the watch sometimes operates very differently from its
regular functioning.

3. Set
an intention for lucid dreaming

Before going to bed, you set an intention to be aware you
are dreaming and repeat that intention until it is firmly implanted in your
mind. Give the intention some juice. “I am going to have fun in my dreams and I
will be aware that I am dreaming” is perfectly acceptable. So is “Tonight I
will go on a road of healing and I will know I am dreaming.”

4. Start
in the Twilight Zone

The twilight zone between sleep and waking is a great launch
pad for adventures in lucid dreaming. Sleep researchers distinguish the
hypnagogic state, when you are on your way to sleep, from the hypnopompic
state, when you are leaving sleep. In both states, if you are able to relax and
entertain the images that form on your mental screen, you may find you are
being offered a rich menu of portals and scenarios for dreaming. Choose to go
with one of those images or developing stories, and you may start out lucid and
stay that way.
However, when the adventure begins in
the first period of the night, you may fall asleep and lose dream awareness
(and often memory of the dream) because your body craves rest. In most people’s
daily cycle, the first hours in bed are a time for “industrial sleep” to
restore and replenish the body. Dream recall and lucid awareness may be less
important in this period, in relation to daily maintenance, than the need for nourishing
sleep and downtime.
The best times to experiment in the
twilight zone are when you wake in the middle of the night, and when you wake
from your final sleep cycle to start the day. I love what becomes available in
the middle of the night (especially between 3:00 and 4:00 a.m.) when I can
simply lie back in a drifty state and let images come. After your final sleep
cycle, you may find you remember dreams that have juice and energy and vivid
detail. If you can arrange your life so you don’t have to jump out of bed right
away, you can stay with one of these dreams and let it unfold into a fully
lucid dream excursion.

5.Reenter
a dream

Dream reentry is the royal road to lucid dreaming. This is
one of the core techniques of Active Dreaming. The central idea is this: a
dream scene is a place you have been, wherever in the worlds that may be.
Because you have been there, you can go there again.
Why would you want to do this?
Maybe you were having a great
adventure or romance, but were interrupted by the alarm clock and would like to
go on with it. Maybe you were fleeing from a nightmare bogey and you realize it
is time to face up to that challenge and resolve it on its own ground – which, by
the way, is the smartest way to end a series of scary dreams. Maybe you want to
talk to someone who appeared in the dream.
Maybe you simply want to develop
entry points for lucid dreaming, personal dream gates through which you can
access realms of adventure, guidance and healing.
How do you practice dream reentry?
You need three things: a strong image, a clear intention, and the ability to
fuel and focus the lucid dream journey that is going to unfold. You hold the
dream that is calling you in your mind and let it become vivid and alive. It might
be the dream from which you just awakened or a dream from years ago, maybe a
dream that frightened you in childhood and was never resolved. Next, you set
your intention. I am going to see what’s
behind that door. I am going to confront my pursuer. I am going to dance with
the bear. I am going to meet my dream lover again on that tropical island and I
don’t have to pay for the plane ticket. If you have a tendency to drift
off to sleep, you may add the intention: I
will remain alert and aware that I am dreaming. If you find that you need extra fuel to
accomplish liftoff, and/or that your focus is easily distracted, try using
shamanic drumming as you embark on the journey. In my workshops, we use
shamanic drumming very frequently to power conscious dream journeys. I have
recorded a CD of shamanic drumming specifically for conscious dream travelers, Wings for the Journey.

6. Look
at the world around you as a waking dream

As is well understood by teachers of dream yoga, lucid
living is fundamental to growing the practice of lucid dreaming. Practice
mindfulness in everyday circumstances. Ask yourself from time to time, What am I doing now? What is playing on my inner soundtrack?
Take some quiet, unscheduled time, inside or out and about, and receive
impressions – both the contents of your mind and the incidents of external
reality – without judgment.
Look for signs and symbols in the
world around you. I suggest many games in this cause in my book Sidewalk Oracles. You’ll become aware that the world is speaking to you in many
voices, and you’ll start to glimpse the patterns of a deeper order of reality,
behind the veils of ordinary perception.
You’ll find you can carry this
heightened awareness into the dream state, and that your deeper dreams will
expand your consciousness, in turn, on the roads of everyday life.Photo by RM

Wednesday, October 28, 2015

I recently posted a story about what unfolds when I am carrying certain kinds of travel reading. A friend just responded with this question:"Have you ever tried picking a specific book, on purpose, to influence reality you are about to live in a certain way ? That would be an interesting experiment."Yes, indeed. And I will try it. In the meantime, it occurred to me that I often travel with copies of my own books, and sometimes this leads to wonderful encounters and conversations. Here is what unfolded when I was traveling with a copy of the French edition of Dreamgates in 2012:I thought I would not have much of a story to share from my long overnight journey to Montpellier. no flight delays, no missed connections or lost bags, empty seats beside me on the first two flights, so no stories like that of the Death's Head Dominatrix (in my new book Sidewalk Oracles). Then, on my last short flight from Paris-CDG to Montpellier, I took out my inflight reading, a book in French titled Les portes du rêve. A flight attendant immediately asked me if she could see the book. Leafing through it with mounting excitement, she saw that one of the driving themes is using dreams of the departed and conscious dream journeys to the Other Side to gain first hand knowledge of what happens after death. "This is my favorite theme," she told me. "I am passionate about it. I am going to get this book!" I now confessed that I was the author. I explained that I was reading myself in hopes of brushing up my French prior to opening a depth workshop near Montpellier titled "Faire de la mort une alliée" (Making Death Your Ally). Les portes durêve is the French version of my book Dreamgates. Cabin service at my end of the cabin was now suspended while the flight attendant proceeded to fire a volley of questions. "To write about these things you must have had a near-death experience, yes?" Yes, indeed. People around us did not seem to mind that the coffee and juice was not being poured. An older couple next to me wanted in on the conversation. Violette, the wife, said, "We are all so hungry for first-hand information about what happens after death. I want to know what I can expect in the afterlife, and I don't want to hear it from priests or psychologists. I want to hear it from people who have been there! And I want to know how I can find out these things for myself." I quoted Montaigne. Puisque nous ne savons pas où la mort nous attend, attendons-la partout. I had forgotten that I don't speak good French as I quoted this wonderful counsel in the original version. "Since we do not know where Death will meet us, let us be ready to meet it everywhere." There was a stir of agreement from folks around us. I realized I now had an audience of at least a dozen people. "I can't think of any subject as important as what you are discussing," a man across the aisle contributed, writing down my name and the title of my book. A male flight attendant joined us, wanting the same information. I observed that we have two main ways of gaining direct knowledge of l'au-delà, the Other Side. We can communicate with people who are at home there, and we can make the crossing before death, to see for ourselves. This led to an urgent series of fresh questions, again centering on my personal experiences. I noted that I have never been content with the term "near death experience" for what happened to me a s boy, when I died and came back. On one occasion, when I checked out of my body during emergency appendectomy, aged nine, I seemed to live a whole life in another world. "I don't think I had a near death experience. I think I died and came back." More questions, more and more urgent. "Do you have no fear of death? "Do you talk to many people who have died?" "Are there many different places where people go when they die?" The short answer to those three, of course, is Yes, Yes, Yes. I gave highest marks to this question: "Were you happier in the life when you died, or the life you are living now?"

That was a tough one. I confessed that I was so in love with the people of the other world who raised me as their own when I went away from this world at age nine that I had a hard time living in the body of a nine-year-old boy when I came back. "I suppose I was in love with Death. I have learned to make Death an ally rather than a lover. I want to be ready to meet him anywhere, everyday. I also want to use him as a counselor who can help me to make my life choices with the courage and clarity only Death can bring." The flight attendant had returned to her regular tasks, but kept coming back to rejoin the conversation. When we landed, she was waiting outside the baggage claim with some of her colleagues. They were all very interested and wanted my website and book information. "You see, we are making you some good publicity, so you will have to keep teaching us about l'au-delà here in France." There was a synchronicity at play in all of this that make it a marvelous confirmation, one of those secret kisses, a bisou from the universe. An hour before I left for the airport on Friday, I had sent my favorite editor a few pages from a book-in-progress, from a chapter titled "The Boy Who Died and Came Back." That became the title of the book itself, and I recounted this episode in an introduction titled "Kiss of Death".

I see that I must be more careful about the books I select as my travel companions. This week it felt like a mischief-making tree spirit leaped out of a book onto the train track in front of me. On Monday I set off to New York City on Amtrak. This was the first time in ages I had gone to the city by train. It can be a beautiful ride. The line runs along the Hudson River most of the way, and it was a fine day to view the fall foliage and the play of light on the water. My attention flitted back and forth between the shifting landscapes through the window and my first literary selection, an excellent collection of cross-cultural studies on the practice of dreaming. among indigenous peoples titled Dream Travelers and edited by Trent University anthropology professor Roger Ivar Lohmann. If you consider a scholarly text safe reading, read on. I was soon immersed in Lohmann's account of his own fieldwork among the Asabano of Papua New Guinea. They consider dreams to be real experiences; you make visits and you receive visitations. Dreaming is a field of interaction with beings of various kinds, including the dead, the fairy-like wobuno, wild nature spirits and witches. "Supernatural encounters are frequent; nevertheless, they are odd and exciting. They are long remembered, the source of many tales around the hearth." * In dreams, spirits might provide guidance that would lead to a successful hunt, especially when the hunter made certain offerings. Dreams could also reveal when a malevolent spirit was the source of illness or misfortune. It seems that in this part of the island, tree spirits are especially engaged with humans. Before recent Christianization, an elder told Lohmann, "When a man was sick, people would dream that a tree spirit or other thing had hurt him." I was startled by the idea that a tree spirit might attack a human. I read on, in the New Guinea elder's account, "I myself have dreamed when someone was sick that the tree spirits made him or her sick."**

At this precise moment, less than fifteen minutes into my journey, the Amtrak train came to a shuddering stop. After a long pause, it was announced over the crackling intercom that "a big tree fell across the track." After another pause, a conductor rushed up and down the aisle yelling that the tree was on fire. "There's smoke!" We couldn't see what was going on, but we were next told that the "big tree" had brought down some power lines. After a long wait, we were told that the train was going back to Albany-Rensselaer, where we had started. We had to shunt in reverse the whole way, agonizingly slowly. Back at our point of departure, we were left to meditate upon life for a long time before we received word that railroad crews had succeeded in clearing one of the two tracks leading to New York City, but we would now have to wait for an incoming train to come through before we could leave. I got to Penn Station nearly four hours late. A ride scheduled to take 2 hours 25 minutes took over six hours. When our train resumed the journey interrupted by the falling tree, I put the anthropology book that did not seem able to contain tree spirits back in my overnight bag. I contemplated the demonic cat on the cover of the second book I had brought with me. It is one of my favorite novels, Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, in which the Devil comes to Moscow with an amazing entourage. I reread it for pleasure every few years. But not today. I recalled that in the opening scene the Devil, traveling as a foreign professor, makes the accurate prediction that a certain person will be beheaded before the end of the day - by a tram. Not a train, but near enough. Over a late dinner in Manhattan, I mused with a Russian friend about a recurring pattern in my travels: the stories I am carrying proceed to play out in my experience of the physical world. I once took off from Bucharest with a Romanian fantasy anthology that included Mircea Eliade's story "With the Gypsy Girls". I was drawn deep into Eliade's eerie tale, in which a man is lured into a bizarre alternate reality from which he cannot return. I found by the end of that first flight that I had been drawn into a very strange parallel reality of my own. I wandered lost all night, stranded at Warsaw's Chopin airport among Russians and Ukrainians who lacked Schengen visas and lay sprawled on every surface like the dead on a field of battle. I managed to extricate myself only two days later. I wrote about that here. On another plane, I was reading a memoir by one of Churchill's bodyguards when a stranger dressed as Indiana Jones took the seat beside me. When I asked him about his costume, he declared that it was "the real thing." He proceeded to tell me that his clothes were made by "Churchill's former bodyguard" - Peter Botwright, who designed the costumes for the Indiana Jones movies. That was just one element in an amazing episode that seemed custom-made for me by some designing minds just behind the curtain of the world. I tell the whole story in the introduction to The Three "Only" Things.At a newsstand at Prague’s Vaclav Havel airport,
I once found a new bilingual edition of the folktales of Czech writer Karel
Jaromir Erben. This became my reading on the first leg of a very long trip home from Europe that ended in a weird limbo of late-night train stations that were
not part of my itinerary. My journey took on the coloration of Erben's dark,
compelling verse fantasies in which (for example) a woman leaves her husband's
bed every night to lie with the dead. You can find that story here. There was the time I was reading A Story Waiting to Pierce You (Peter Kingsley's book on Tibetan-Mongolian shamanism) and got, for my neighbor on another plane....a dominatrix wearing a top hat and Death's heads on the backs of her gloves. The full story is in Sidewalk Oracles Back to my latest story. Late Monday night, after walking uptown from Penn Station and checking into my hotel, I was sitting with my Russian friend in El Mitote, a lively Mexican restaurant on the upper West Side. I sipped a margarita and quoted Borges: "The mind is dreaming. The world is its dream." "Good thing you did not spend too much time today with The Master and Margarita today," my friend observed. "Strange things are known to happen when people get involved with that book."

In the Mexican restaurant, the Dia de los Muertos had come early. Skeletons in flouncy skirts and tight jackets were dancing on the wall. In the light of the morning, I found Dante standing in a little triangle of green between my hotel and Lincoln Center. Of course. Story within story, all unfolding within the great Commedia. At the television network where I recorded a show, I was greeted by a young woman named Angel. Things seemed to be looking up. Memo to self: when you travel, check what themes and plots you are carrying with you.

*Roger Ivar Lohmann, "Supernatural Encounters of the Asabano in Two Traditions and Three States of Consciousness" in Lohmann (ed) Dream Travelers: Sleep Experiences and Culture in the Western Pacific (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) 191.** ibid, 193.

Monday, October 26, 2015

You begin Sidewalk
Oracles by saying, “We are embarking on a path of real magic.” Please
explain.

Real
magic is the art of bringing gifts from another world into this world. We do
this when we go dreaming and when we remember to bring something back. We can also walk the roads of everyday life as
conscious or lucid dreamers, learning to recognize how the world is speaking to
us in signs and symbols. In night dreams and conscious excursions, we get out there; we go near or far into other orders of
reality where the rules of linear time and Newtonian physics do not apply.
Through synchronicity, powers of the deeper reality come poking and probing
through the walls of our consensual hallucinations to bring us awake. Sometimes
they work to confirm or encourage us in a certain line of action; sometimes
they intercede to knock us back and discourage us from persisting in the worst
of our errors.

Sidewalk Oracles is full of fun everyday games. You call one of them
Sidewalk Tarot. What is Sidewalk Tarot and how do you play it?

I
invented the phrase Sidewalk Tarot after I noticed that things keep literally
popping up, like tarot cards, on the streets and sidewalks of the small city
where I live. Anything that enters your field of perception, through any of
your senses, within your chosen time frame may count as a card in play, even as
one of the greater trumps.
There are two basic ways to play the game of
Sidewalk Tarot. The first is to put your
question to the world. Do you have a question
or theme in your life on which you would like help or guidance right now? Then
try to state that theme as clearly as possible. A simple way to that is to fill
in the blank in the following statement: “I would like guidance on……” The game now is to be ready to receive
the first unusual, striking thing that enters your field of perception as the
tarot card the world is dealing you in response to your question.
The second basic way to play
Sidewalk Tarot is to schedule ten or twenty minutes of unscheduled time to let the world put its question to you.
Using all your senses, you gather impressions during that short period of time
and then study them as you would look at a tarot spread.I make it my intention, the first time I leave the house
(or wherever I am staying) in the course of a day, to gather three observations
from my external environment. These do not need to be extraordinary in any way,
just things that pop up on the street. As in drawing from a tarot deck, you can
choose to play with as few or as many cards as you like. The big difference is
that a tarot deck offers you only 78 cards; the number of cards in the world
deck cannot be counted.

You invented a new
word – kairomancy – for the practice of navigating by synchronicity. Please
explain.

I
invented the word “kairomancy” to describe the practice of navigating by
synchronicity. It builds on the idea that a key feature of the experience of
meaningful coincidence is that we know this is a special moment when things
operate differently. The Greeks have` a word for a special moment of this kind.
They call it a Kairos moment. Kairos is also a god, the antithesis of Chronos,
the old god of tick-tock linear time. Kairos is jump time, opportunity time,
the special moment you have to seize before it is lost.
So: Kairomancy. The word literally
means divination by special moments. But it means more. It means being poised
to seize time by the forelock – to recognize a special moment of opportunity
(or warning) and act on it tight away.

You invite us to
become kairomancers, which sounds romantic and mysterious. What is a
kairomancer and how does someone become one?

A
kairomancer is someone who is ready to recognize the special moments when
synchronicity is at work – and to seize on the revelation or opportunity that
is now available.To be a
kairomancer, you must be:

Open to new experienceAvailable, willing to set aside
plans and step out of boxesThankful, grateful for secret
handshakes and surprises, and ready toHonor your special moments by taking
appropriate action.

If you want to become a kairomancer you need a poet in your soul. You need to grow your
ability to recognize what rhymes in a day, or a week, or a life and to build
that “talent for resemblances” that was held to be the primary requirement for
a dream interpreter in ancient Greece. So, yes, this is quite romantic. Walk
this path, and you’ll find there is a champagne fizz of excitement in the air
any day.

Explain what you mean
when you say “coincidence multiplies when we are in motion”.

When you
are on the road, outside your regular commute, you are more likely to notice
novel things around you. When your plans get screwed up, and you can avoid Type
A personality disorder, you may find that
Trickster energy comes into play, making new connections.
Synchronicity often becomes
especially strong when we are going through major life passages, involving
birth or death, falling or out of love, losing a job or taking a creative leap.
Our emotions are stirred up, and the world seems to be stirred to move in different
ways around us.

You give us a
synchronicity game called “Listen for Your Daily Kledon”. What is a kledon and
how does this work?

I borrowed the word kledon from the ancient Greeks.
A kledon is sound or speech coming out of silence or undifferentiated noise.
Sounds and voices heard in this way were one of the most important oracles in
ancient Greece. A kledon is often something you overhear — a snatch from a
stranger’s conversation, a song from a passing car radio, the croak or cry of a
bird, the siren of an ambulance.

Another everyday game
you suggest is bibliomancy. What is that and how does it work?

Bibliomancy is literally “divination by the book”. You have a
theme on your mind, and you open a book at random and look for guidance in what
you see on the page. People of faith have often used sacred books in this way,
as Abe Lincoln turned to his family Bible (the one on which Preseident Obama
swore his oath) for a second opinion on his prophetic dream of his
assassination. You can use any book you like, and instead of setting an
intention you can simply let the text in front of you offer a spontaneous
message for the day.

One of your rules for
navigating by synchronicity is “Notice What’s Showing through the Slip”. You
say this even led you to your present publisher. Talk to us about that.

When I first spoke to Georgia Hughes, the wonderful editorial
director of New World Library, on the phone, she spoke to me as if we had been
close friends for ages. I was surprised, and asked if she knew who I was. “You
are Robert Moss,” she told me. “You are the author we are publishing.” This was
strange, because I had never discussed any book project with Georgia, though I
now had one in mind. When I mentioned this, she realized she had confused me
with Richard Moss, one of her stable of authors. I begged her not to apologize.
“There are Freudian slips and then there are cosmic slips. This one is an
opportunity.” I was now emboldened to lay out the idea for the book that was
published as The Three “Only” Things.
A day later, we had a contract. I have stayed with New World Library ever
since. An editor’s slip turned me into a constant author. So: if you hear a
name misspoken, or spot a typo, pay attention. Something may be showing through
the slip.

Physicists speculate
that we are living in Many Interactive Worlds. You say that through dreaming
and monitoring synchronicity, we can acquire evidence of the existence of
parallel worlds and use this to do some good. Please explain.

It is an emerging consensus in physics that we live in one of
numberless parallel universes and that the “many worlds” are interactive in
ways that escape our ordinary attention, Synchronistic encounters and moments
of déjà vu can help to awaken us to these possibilities. When we keep dream
reports over time we sometimes notice that we seem to be living continuous
lives in other realities, near or far from our present one. Once you awaken to
this possibility, you may start to observe how choices you are making now are
bringing you nearer or farther from parallel selves who made different choices
in the past. This discovery can equip you to make the conscious effort to draw
gifts and lessons from those parallel selves

How
do you explain what you do to people who are meeting you for the first time?

When
I am asked by a stranger on a plane, "What do you do?" my favorite
answer is this: "I am a storyteller, and one of my greatest pleasures is
to help people discover their bigger stories, and live those stories and tell
them so well that they want to take root in the world."

What is the most
important thing you have learned about reality?

The only time
is Now. All other times - past, present and parallel - can be accessed in
this moment of Now, and may be changed for the better.-Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss has just been published by New World Library.

Sunday, October 25, 2015

When we suffer
trauma or bitter disappointment or violent shock, soul may leave the body, to
escape. This produces the phenomenon that psychologists call dissociation and
shamans call soul loss. It can be seen as a survival mechanism. When you can’t
take any more pain, you go away in order to make it through.
A child who has been abused, a survivor
grieving for a beloved partner who has died, a lover who has been betrayed and
abandoned, a soldier who is
shell-shocked, and the victim of a terrible accident are all likely to have
suffered major soul loss.
Let’s
notice that soul loss need not be major, or the result of violent events. We
suffer a lesser degree of soul loss when we choose one direction in life over
another, or when we put our energy and focus into one thing rather than another
– like holding down the job instead of pursuing a creative project, or being a
mom instead of a lover (or vice versa). Soul
loss may be merely temporary and transitional “soul drift”, as when we are
jet-lagged and it takes a while for us to catch up with ourselves.

ØWhat is the difference, in a
practical sense, between someone with a lot of soul in their bodies and someone
who does not?

For
people with a lot of soul, or vital energy, in their bodies, most of the
symptoms of soul-loss listed above would be rare, transient, or absent. For
someone who has suffered significant soul loss, three or more of these symptoms
are likely to be chronic.

ØWhy does the soul have a hard
time staying in the body?

We
suffer pain or abuse, grief or shame, and part of us finds the world so cruel
that we want to go away. Soul loss is also caused by wrenching life choices: we
decide to leave a relationship, a home, a job, a country, a lifestyle — but
part of us resists that choice, sometimes to the point of splitting away and
withdrawing its energy from our lives. We also lose soul energy when
we give up on our dreams and settle for a life of dull compromise, refusing to
trust ourselves to love or to take that creative leap.

ØWhere does soul go when it
leaves?

Sometimes
we find that a part of ourselves is stuck
in the old place, in Granma’s house, or in the apartment we shared with our
first love. Sometimes a soul part we lost seems to be living in a separate
reality, like the land of the Lost Boys in Peter Pan. When we wish ourselves
dead, a part of our soul may go far way, as far as a Land of the Dead.

ØAre all aspects of soul
recoverable?

There
are parts that are so damaged we don’t want them back. Sometime they appear
burned or charred, dark or addicted. Sometimes our life choices are so radical
that a part of ourselves simply cannot be persuaded to share our present
situation. My inner businessman is quite disgusted with the choices I have
made, and won’t stay close to me unless I make money more of a priority than I
am likely to do!

ØWhat is the first step that
someone who would like to experience more soul in their life to take?

You do
some cleanup, and you ask for help. In my book Dreaming the Soul Back Home, as in my retreats, I offer
practical guidance for psychic cleansing and release. One of my favorites is a
very simple fire releasing in which we cast out any heavy energies that are
holding us back and clear a space for vital soul to come back in. It’s very
important to remember that we have help available, including from our spiritual
allies and our own Greater Self, and that it’s always a good idea to ask for
help nicely.

ØWhat role does addiction play
in soul loss?

Addiction
can be both a cause and an effect of soul loss. Part of our brighter energy may
leave us if we fall into habits and company it doesn’t like. When we are
missing a part of ourselves, things come in to fill the gap, and we reach for
things to fill that gap. From a shamanic viewpoint, addictions are often
worsened by spirits of the dead who are seeking to feed their own cravings
through a living person. I have never met a true alcoholic, for example, who
has not (from my viewpoint) been accompanied by dead drunks. In the book, as in
my programs, I offer practical guidance to create healthy psychic boundaries
between the living and the deceased.

ØWhat is the
difference between spirit and soul?

We
can’t lose spirit, when the term means mind, higher consciousness or our spark
of the Godhead. But we can lose contact
with it, and block our own access to the Greater Self. Soul is a different matter. Soul is quite
mobile and soul energy is divisible; we can lose parts of it and take on parts
from others that we really don’t want around.

ØYou have developed an original
approach to healing through what you call “soul recovery”. What are the key
elements in this approach?

We use the core techniques of Active
Dreaming to bring more of soul into the body and help others to become whole.
By learning to share dreams with others in the right way, we create a safe
space where our younger and brighter selves can draw closer, and we start to
build communities of soul friends. By learning to use a dream as a doorway
through which we can travel — in shamanic lucid dreaming — into a deeper space,
we can go to the places where lost souls can be found and reclaimed, and we
help each other to do this.

ØAre there other ways, in
addition to working with our dreams, to experience soul recovery? If so, what are they?

Soul retrieval, as opposed to soul recovery is a shamanic operation in
which the practitioner makes a journey on behalf of a client to locate lost
aspects of soul, brings them back, and transfers them to the client’s body,
often by blowing them into energy centers such as the heart and the crown of
the head. It can be a profoundly healing event. It reaches parts that Western
psychology often does not reach, and may be essential in cases where people are
missing so much of themselves that they are not equipped to become self-healers
until an intervention has taken place. The limitation of this is approach is
that nearly everything depends on the character and skill of the practitioner,
on the reality of his or her connection with spirit helpers, and on the quality
and motivation of those helpers.

ØYou say that dreams not only
show us what the soul wants, they also show us where it has gone. Please elaborate and provide an example of
this.

Our dreams can tell us which parts of ourselves may be missing, and when
it is timely to bring them home. Recurring dreams in which we go back to a
scene from our earlier lives may indicate that a part of us has remained there.
Dreams in which we perceive a younger self as a separate individual may be
nudging us to recognize and recover a part of ourselves we lost at that age.
Sometimes we do not know who that beautiful child is – until we take a closer
look
A middle-aged woman recently
approached me for help. She told me, "I feel I have lost the part of me that
can give trust and know joy." As preparation for our meeting, I asked her
to start a dream journal, although she had told me she had not remembered her
dreams for many years. When she came to see me, she had succeeded in capturing
just one tiny fragment from a dream. She remembered that she was standing over
a table, looking at three large-size "post-it" notes. Each had a
typed message. But the ink had faded and she could not read the messages.
Slowly and carefully, I helped her to
relax and encouraged her to try to go back inside her dream. Quite quickly, she
found herself inside a room in the house where she had lived with her
ex-husband prior to their divorce, almost twenty years before. Now she could
read the typed messages. The first read in bold capitals, "YOU CAN DO
IT." They were all about living with heart, and trusting life.
She realized that she had left her
ability to love and to trust in that room for nearly twenty years. I asked her
what she needed to do. She told me, "I need to bring my heart out of that
room and put it back in my body." She gathered up the messages and made
the motion of bringing them into her heart. As her hands crossed over the place
of her heart, we both saw a sweet and gentle light shine out from her heart
center. She trembled, eyes shining, and told me, "Something just came
back. Something that was missing for twenty years."Bear creation by Tracy Cunningham. Bear is a great ally in soul recovery.

Friday, October 23, 2015

The greatest contribution of the ancient shamans to our medicine and healing today is the understanding that in the course of any life we are liable to suffer soul loss - the loss of parts of our vital energy and identity – and that in order to be whole and well, we must find the means of soul recovery.

On a visceral level, we all know how soul loss comes about. We suffer pain or trauma or abuse, we are overwhelmed by grief or guilt or shame, and part of us goes away because it doesn’t want to stay in a world that seems so harsh and cruel. We are compelled to make a wrenching life choice, leaving a partner or a job or a home, and part of us resists that choice and parts company with our dominant personality, clinging to the old relationship or the old place. Soul loss deepens when we fall into depression or addiction or make compromises with the world as we understand it, giving up on our big dreams of life. Lacking the courage and confidence to make that creative leap, or to trust ourselves to love, we wimp out – and part of our bright spirit, disgusted with us, goes away.

Good analysts and therapists can help us to recognize parts of ourselves we have repressed and denied, including the famous Shadow, the term especially favored by Jungians for what we have tried to relegate to the basement of the personal unconscious because we would rather not own it as a part of ourselves. The shamanic concept of soul loss reaches further. It recognizes that soul healing is not only about recognizing and integrating aspects of the self that we have buried or denied; it is retrieving pieces of soul that have literally gone missing and need to be located and persuaded to return and take up residence in the body where they belong.

In my own practice, I have come to distinguish five forms of soul loss or disconnection that call for healing. I have yet to encounter a human being who is immune to any of these.

Loss of vital energy

You suffer from chronic fatigue. You find yourself torpid and listless, reluctant to get out of bed. Your days seem drab and gray and joyless. Your immune system in blown and you seem to pick up every passing bug. There is something missing in you and you try to stuff the whole with sugar or booze.

Loss of younger selves

You have lost younger versions of yourself – the young child with abounding energy and that beautiful imagination, that fine romantic who was hurt or betrayed as a teen, that inner poet or businessman who wanted to make different life choices from the ones you made. These younger selves have gifts and energy you can use in your life today if only you can find out where they are and discover how to bring them back.

Loss of animal spirits

Indigenous and ancestral shamans know that we are all connected to the world of the animal powers, and that by recognizing and nurturing our relation with animal spirits, we find and follow ther natural path four eneries. Yet many of us have lost this primal connection, or know it only as a superficial wannabe symbolic thing that we look up in books and medicine cards without feeding and living every day.

Loss of ancestral soul

This is a two-edged affair. When we live oblivious to the fact that we are always in the presence of the ancestors – those of our bloodlines, those of the land where we live, and those of our spiritual kin in a broader sense – we are likely to be the plaything and even the tenement for entities we don’t necessarily want to have near us. When we awaken to ancestral soul, we become ready to claim the connection with wisdom-keepers and protectors who can help us to re-establish heathy psychic boundaries and clear out what does not belong with us.

Loss of connection with the Greater Self

Ultimately we can only make peace between the many aspects of our selves, and follow a path of true spiritual evolution by opening or re-opening a direct and conscious connection with the Self on a higher level – the Self that is no stranger. When we clear the right space within our embodied selves, we may be ready for the deep and beautiful act of soul growing that I call spiritual enthronement, bringing a part of the Higher Self to live in our bodies and infuse our lives and our life choices with its radiance.

I have learned that dreams often show us where soul had gone, and offer paths by which it can be reached and encouraged to come home. Through the techniques of Active Dreaming, we can learn to help each other to become the shamans of our own souls and the healers of our own lives.

~

I wrote this article early in 2011 and then expanded it into key chapters of my book Dreaming the Soul Back Home: Shamanic Dreaming for Healing and Becoming Whole (New World Library). The original article elicited a tremendous response; this feels like the right time to share it again.

Thursday, October 22, 2015

He lived with his large and imposing wife Violet in a blue and white house overlooking the Gulf, with a verandah on the upper level to catch the sea breezes. Under the fierce desert sun, he went shooting in gaiters and country tweeds, and may have looked, in his florid bulk, the model of the type of colonial Englishman who does not go native.

But Colonel H.R.P. (Harold) Dickson was very far from a stereotype. Born in what is now Syria, he was Bedouin as well as British – in the eyes of that desert people – from the time he suckled at the breast of a Bedouin wet nurse. As he rose high in the ranks of the colonial civil service, becoming British Political Agent in Kuwait from 1929 to 1936, he hunted with the Bedouin, and counseled with them over innumerable cups of cardamom-flavored coffee, and dreamed like them.

On at least two occasions before his retirement, he brought the Sheikh of Kuwait prophetic dreams. One forewarned of a natural disaster that would destroy much of the capital but result in abundance. It was fulfilled when storm and flood washed away thousands of mudbrick houses, and then made the desert bloom. In the second dream, Dickson foresaw an attempt on the life of the king of Saudi Arabia. When the assassination attempt took place, his prowess as a prophetic dreamer was confirmed. “The Sheikh of Kuwait marveled still more, and told my story to many of his friends,” he recalled in his book The Arab of the Desert.. “The story got about and my stock went up quite appreciably in Kuwait. My dreams are still given proper weight, but I am careful not to give too much away.”

The Sheikh urged him to stay on in Kuwait after he retired from the colonial service, and he continued to live and to dream in his blue and white house as Chief Local Representative of the Kuwait Oil Company.

In September 1937, the Kuwait Oil Company was drilling at a lonely place called Bahra, and work was not going well. They had probed far deeper than they had intended, and fond no trace of oil.

That month, Dickson dreamed that he and his wife were living in a bungalow in an oil camp in the heart of the desert. Nothing was growing in the scene except an immense ancient sidr tree, standing near the house. A wild wind blew up a sand storm of unusual violence. It shook the house and the grains in the air made it hard to breathe. When the storm abated, Dickson went out and saw that the storm had opened a great cavity under the tree. He looked down into what appeared to be an ancient tomb. A prone figure, shrouded in rotted yellow cotton cloth, lay on a stone slab.

When Dickson and his wife began to peel the ruined cloth away from the mummy’s head, they were surprised by the beauty of the young woman’s face that was revealed. Her skin was like parchment. Dickson called for his servants to dig a fresh grave, but to his amazement the mummy came alive. The parchment skin grew soft and smooth, and a lovely woman stepped free from her shrouds. She told the Dicksons she was cold, after sleeping for thousands of years, and needed food and warm clothes. She gave them a very ancient copper coin. They led her by the hand into the house, where their Arab maid washed her and dressed her while they prepared food.

After eating, the woman from the tomb sat under the sidr tree. She warned that “wicked men” would try to bury her again, and that Dickson must seek the aid of the Sheikh and the British government. As she spoke, a mob of angry men, brandishing weapons, appeared. They were led by a white-bearded man armed with a long knife “who looked like a Persian”. Colonel Dickson flew to the defense, killing the leader with a blow, and driving off the men who were digging a fresh grave. He took the girl back inside his bungalow.

Waking in high excitement, Dickson roused his wife Violet and she carefully recorded all the details of his dream. This was a regular procedure in the Dickson household; he felt this one augured immense good fortune.

But it was necessary to find out exactly what was going on in the dream. For this, Dickson sought counsel from a local expert, a Bedouin woman called Umm Mubarak, who was much respected as a diviner and reader of dreams. The sand devil that opened the mummy’s tomb might be a djinn – a desert demon. It might also be a drilling rig. Umm Mubarak sifted the elements of the dream, and gave Dickson her judgment. The mummy that came alive and gave him treasure from the earth was showing the way to a fabulous oil field that had not yet been discovered. The ancient tree, growing alone in the desert, gave away the location. Umm Mubarak had seen this tree; it had survived alone in a waste of sand in the Burqan hills. The angry mob consisted of people in the region who would oppose Western oil operations.

Dickson told his dream to the Sheikh of Kuwait, who heard him with great respect. He told the managers f the Kuwait Oil Company that they should move their drilling operations to Burqan. The oil company followed Dickson’s advice, and early in 1938 they hit a gusher. The find – known as Burqan Number One – was one of the richest oil discoveries in history. It was a great coup for the British in those edgy months on the eve of World War II. It turned Kuwait into a fabulously wealthy country, tempting Saddam Hussein, more than half a century later, to launch the invasion that triggered the first Gulf War.

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Kai Altair is a wonderfully creative singer-songwriter, dancer and film maker who is also a teacher of Active Dreaming. Dreams and shamanic journeys have powered and inspired some of her songs and you can listen to them on her heart-stirring CD Dreamwalker. I have been privileged to witness the genesis of one of her songs in one of my depth workshops. Here Kai recounts a powerful dream in which Yoko Ono gives her an avocado sandwich and John Lennon advises her on how to set up a music album while Yoko cooks dinner. In the dream, John is the one who is aware that he is dead.Advice from The Walrusby Kai Altair

Inside a spontaneous night dream I step into the world-behind-the world of a small Caribbean island I lived on as a little girl. I find myself in the back of a car being driven by Yoko Ono with John Lennon in the passenger seat. I sit behind him while nibbling an avocado sandwich Yoko packed for me. I feel happy, and content, as though the two of them are family members--almost like parents--who are taking care of me and want me to be happy. Also in the car are a few very magical cats who add to the sweet energies that pass between all of us as we travel to John and Yoko's house. When we arrive, Yoko begins to cook as John and I talk about music in the kitchen. Everything feels very relaxed as we talk and exchange ideas, and I am in awe of John's incredible mind and musical intuition. We come to the topic of how to begin an album, and the best way to introduce a body of work to the listener. You need an epic opening," John says, and tells me about the importance of making a statement through sound from the very start. I love the idea, and feel blessed to be able to receive advice from someone like him. "I love to talk to you like this John," I say, "You always have such great advice. We really have to find a way for us to still be able to talk about music after you're dead." To this he gives a hearty belly laugh while nodding his head, "HaHa!! I AM dead!"

I woke from the dream feeling deeply moved, with the distinct feeling that this could indeed have been an encounter with an aspect of John Lennon. The next thought that came to me however, was one of doubt. I felt silly and a bit delusional to think that the spirit of a legendary rock star would take the time to visit me in a dream. I knew that I'd gotten some very good advice though, and decided not to worry about if it was 'real' or not. My action plan was to do just what the dream told me to do, and create a powerful and 'epic' opening for my first full length album. Today when I listen to it I feel grateful for the dream advice. It serves to thin the veil and honor the source by announcing the songs that will follow with a direct order from a dream.

Photo: Kai Altair in the video of her song "The Calling". Visit her website.

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